The Nature of Music

Music has always fascinated me. It seems other-worldly. It directly appeals to the ear, but it can be read as poetry as well, and so it indirectly appeals to the imagination. Modern music is accompanied by the 'music video'. In the days of the Opera, the orchestra accompanied the drama on stage. In ancient Greece, the Tragedies of Auschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides dominated the era. Here, like during the time of Wagner, both the eye and the ear are enchanted. Today, movies show the combination of the stage and music on a new level. The camera can reveal what a mere set piece might not be able to show. The reverse might be true as well. But we can all admit that music enriches - in some mysterious way - experience. It colors a landscape with a translucent glory. Our consciousness - when under music's spell - foists upon the things in our visual field a mystical aroma, and the objects themselves seem transfigured.


But what happens when the music passes the ear, or when the visuals pass the eye? What then? Music seems filled with information, since music is usually mediated through language. But what if we don't understand the language? Songs sung in a foreign tounge can be equally aesthetically pleasing. Consider the music of Sigur Ros, an Icelandic band. Much of their lyrics are Icelandic; but some of their songs are sung in a language the band made up. The language is called Hopelandic. Here, a message is being communicated, but I don't know what it is. And yet I'm moved. I'm moved sometimes to tears.

Scores with no singing can attain to the same grandeur. Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Bach, and other classical composers fall in this category. What is strange is that these composers tried to reincarnate human emotion in their compositions. How is this possible? And how is it possible for a critic - or you or me - to think, "Beethoven has succeeded in making this composition sound like the emotion of 'dread'." Or, at least, to me. Perhaps others are not moved.

Look out your window with no music. Depending on your mood, you might find the experience prosaic. But look out your window again, and this time play Debussy's Clair de Lune. Try not to pay direct attention to the music, but observe Nature through the window. Your vision seems to gradually transfigure, doesn't it? The music elevates the whole scene to a new height, and your immediate consciousness seems changed. The music arouses an inner mystical awareness of Something you know not what. But we don't deny the music points to Something. Our ignorance of it intrigues us more, since we get the feeling it's teasing us. Nietzche once asked us to assume that truth is a woman. What then? A woman is fickle; she isn't transparent about her intensions; and when we think we have her figured out, her whole nature morphs into something strange, and she vanishes again, only to reappear by incantation, as if by a spell.

Was Nietzche on to something when he wrote 'The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music'? Reason - represented by the god Apollo - doesn't have center stage. It is enslaved to the passions. We believe what we want, and then rationalize those wants. Hence, Pascal said that if we doubt the Christian faith, don't try to multiply proofs, but try to change your affections, and your mind will follow. Act 'as if you did believe', exhorts Pascal, and you will come to believe. If you multiply proofs with a hard heart, your doubts fester. Nietzche follows suit and gives music a preeminent role. Reason is enslaved by passion, and passion is born of Greek Tragedy, but Greek Tragedy spawns from the Spirit of Music. Music itself is at the bottom of it all. It is pregant with life, and it gives birth to more life. It seems the Bible goes along with this. Tradition says God sang the Heavens and Earth into existence. And when He called creation good, the angels sang for joy. Out of the Spirit of Music - perhaps finding an origin in the Trinity - Tragedy comes on the scene. We have grand, sweeping epics laced throughout the Old Testament, chronicling the success and enslavement of Israel. Out of this morass, the Logos emerges: Reason. In the fullness of time, Christ comes. Reason, again, submits to Death in the context of the Tragedy of his crucifixion. When Reason submits to this motif, Reason resurrects, re-born, and ascends again to whence He came, back into the Spirit of Music, within the Trinity.

In his book 'Either/Or', Soren Kierkegaard wrote a chapter entitled, 'The Immediate Erotic Stages, Or the Musical-Erotic', in which Mozart's Don Giovanni is examined. Don Giovanni is Kierkegaard's pick for a perfect musical work of art. Kierkegaard is looking for the perfect medium for what he calls 'the sensuous'. Music is that medium. Sculpture, painting, and poetry all fail. Not sculpture, because it's not inward enough. Not painting, because music doesn't have contours, though a painting can hint at it. Plus, it isn't contained in 'the instant', otherwise it could be painted. Since it itself doesn't necessarily have words, poetry - constituted by words - can't embody it. He says music has an element of time, since there is succession: before, during, after. But it itself isn't in time. And while we need the ear to hear the music, the music makes us wish we could break free from our senses. It calls us out of ourselves.

Some theologians think that music will be our language in Heaven.

Arthur Schopenhauer thought that 'willing' was the source of suffering. Short of killing our will, he thought that music releases us from suffering temporarily. At the bottom of everything, Schopenhauer thought, wasn't Reason, but Will. And that music represented this Will, passion, striving, groping, reaching, desiring, love, emotion, etc . . . All other art 'copies' the Will; but music 'embodies' it. Could this 'Will' be God's love?